I have been a Adobe Photoshop Lightroom user since the first day I started photography. When I was still shooting with the Nikon cameras, I never gave it a thought about trying out other RAW editors. However, things changed for me after I switched to Fujifilm X series camera, specifically Fujifilm X-T2. The biggest problem with Lightroom is it simply can't handle sharpening Fujifilm's RAW files very well. Every time I had to bring the RAW files into Photoshop as a tiff file then apply sharpening there. I found this process is not very enjoyable. Eventually I decided to give Capture One a try. I downloaded the free trial version and purchased a license after the 30-day free trial. Now I have been using Capture One for more than six months, and finally I made the decision to entirely switch from Lightroom to Capture One, not only because it handles Fujifilm's RAW files better, but also because it provides more powerful tools that meet my needs. In this post, I am going to talk about the features that won me over to Capture One. Remember Capture One provides a 30-day free trial and at any point if you are interested to purchase the license, you can save 10% by using the voucher code AMBCAI.

In this post, I am going to show you three tools that you can use to add contrast in Capture One. Check out the following video:

The first tool that you can use is the contrast slider in exposure tool tab. Basically it pushes the highlight to be brighter and pushes the shadow to be darker at the same time. Other than that, you don't have much control. It is easy to use, but not flexible. That is why I don't use it very often.

The second tool is levels. You can add contrast by setting the black point, mid point and the white point. If you want to stretch or compress the histogram, it is a great tool for that purpose.

The third tool is my favorite when it comes to adding contrast, and that is the curve tool in Capture One. It is flexible because it allows you to control which part of the photo you want to add contrast and how much contrast you want to add. I usually add contrast in Luma channel because that allows me to add contrast without adding saturation. That way, I can go back to the exposure tool tab and add saturation separately. That allows me to have separate control over saturation and contrast, which makes the photo editing more flexible.